Movie Review: Wild Tales Is A Guilty Pleasure

Wild Tales, a dark comedy composed of six short movies that have one major theme running throughout them, revenge. A spurned lover, aggressive driver, and a devastated bride are just a few of the characters you’ll meet in this film by Argentinian director, Damián Szifron.

Starting with “Pasternak” and a plane full of people who come to realize they all have one unexpected thing in common, Wild Tales makes you laugh aloud before you start to cringe. Each story that follows is more hysterical, more surreal, and more violent then the one before.

That violence is overwhelming in “Road To Hell.” Everyone has dreamed about getting revenge on a fellow driver. You know, the guy who cut you off, called you names, maybe did both? But the vengeance depicted here falls just short of a gore film. It was excessive. Luckily the rest of the tales take the violence back down to a more manageable level.

The true gem is at the end, “‘Til Death Do Us Part” with Érica Rivas as Romina, the maligned bride. When Romina discovers her groom Ariel (Diego Gentile) has not only been unfaithful but invited the lady in question to their wedding, she becomes devastated. Romina’s transformation from devastated to destructive, seamlessly executed by Rivas, takes this unfortunate affair and turns it into a chaotic justice.

Wild Tales takes its time to tell you its stories and there are no morals at the end of them. The people involved don’t learn a lesson from their actions. You leave the story at the end, not knowing what happens next to the people who lost control and took things a step too far. It wouldn’t even be hard to see yourself in their place enacting revenge on government bureaucracy or trying to buy your way out of doing hard time. Wild Tales is a foreign film but revenge is universal.

WILD TALES

A Film by Damián Szifron
Produced by Hugo Sigman, Pedro Almodóvar, Agustín Almodóvar,
Esther García and Matías Mosteirín

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